Stephen Downes

This is a bit of an ironic article for a website with the subhead "It's JSON all the way down" but it's still worth a read. Here's the gist: websites and structured data were originally defined using 'markup' languages like HTML and XML (these are the ones with all the angle brackets). But these specifications became more and more complex, with the peak of absurd complexity reached in Microsoft's OOXML. So some developers came up with an alternative tool, called markdown, that could translate some very basic easy-to-remember formatted text that into HTML. "You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format."